featherynscale | The inevitable post-Con post (Reply)

We survived, once again proving that the human body can withstand vast quantities of party on very little sleep, if the proper amount of caffeine is also applied. I'm not really coherent enough for full narrative, though, so I'm breaking it down into categories, with bullet points.

Highlights of Con

The "When Heavy Metal is Just Too Heavy" panel in the costuming track, which was all about how to make armor out of lightweight materials. triadruid and I doubled our costuming fu just by attending. See "What we learned" for more information.
Singing Tesla Coils! I'd seen it on the Intartubes, but in person, much cooler. Also, I got hit on by a very creditable John Steed while watching them.
Getting hit on generally by an assortment of geekboys and geekgirls. I probably shouldn't enjoy that, but I do. So there.
auraseer's homebrew. Yum.
The "Are you a Darkfriend" games that Wheel of Time track put on. I greatly prefer the stupid parlor game of Mafia to the long, drawn-out, impeccably reasoned mafia games that some people play online. Fun!
Getting recognized in the Promethea outfit by about 10 people. And getting photographed by a number of other people, who then said "Who are you supposed to be?" or "Are you Hermes?" and so on. One guy came up to me in the consuite and said, "Diana, right?". I explained who I actually was, and his buddy came up behind him going "Ha! Told you! Owned!" :)
Freek donated approximately a billion flats of energy drink to the con. The pink sugar-free flavor is really, really good, and I drank more of it than seemed reasonable. I'll be looking for places to get it in Kansas City. The website is surprisingly unhelpful in this area.
Winning stuff in the Wheel of Time costume contest for my Sea Folk outfit. (Thanks to niveus_tigris for emergency nose-ring assistance.) Also, getting recognized by people who I hadn't seen in context of WoT track stuff. That costume seemed to work out really well (and I assume anybody who wasn't familiar with the series probably thought I was a pirate, so that's okay too.)
Probably some other stuff that I can't think of right now, and will add later.

What we learned

Felt + shellac = armor that weighs practically nothing and can handle a surprising amount of abuse. The costumer guys took a helmet made that way and spiked it like a football in the middle of the panel, and it bounced nicely.
Barge Rubber Cement will allegedly glue anything to anything, up to and including your dog to the wall.
All the nifty decorative metal things in the world are apparently available from Eastern Findings.
If we had a copy of this book at EHQ, nothing could stand in the way of our world domination.
Staying in the Hyatt is not nearly as much of a pain in the arse as I thought. This might be because most of our trips down from the room were before the beginning of Con programming, and most of our trips back up were between 3 and 5 a.m.
It's better to watch the Masquerade from your hotel room on DCTV than live in the ballroom. In your room, you can drink and be snarky, which is what the competition desperately needs. (Seriously, kids. WoT track has a gong for their show, and will gong you off if you're dawdling. Nobody wants to see 7 minutes of lip-sync and posturing, no matter how good your outfit is. Walk on, turn around, make your costume do anything it's going to do, and then Walk Away.)
What a panel is allegedly about is often only tangentially related to what it's actually going to be about. Sometimes this works in the attendees' favor.
If I'm wearing a bodice, I can fit a pistol bottle of rum in my cleavage. The whole bottle. And pour shots by leaning over, if necessary. (Everybody needs a stupid party trick, yes?)

Pissing and Moaning

The 14-hour drive on Thursday somehow took 18-19 hours to complete. So I totally blew my opportunity to go for drinks with jackbabalon23.
Taking the stairs to the tenth floor is doable. Taking the stairs to the 20th floor, not so much.
I didn't see nearly as much of kittenpants during con as I would have liked. And, in general, our party was not very good at meeting up at agreed-upon meeting times. This is true pretty much every year, though. :( Gotta work on that.
My sandals died on the trip, which jacked up my back likewhoa.

Stuff we acquired

Lots of art. kittenpants bought me an exceedingly beautiful painting for my birthday (which also happened to be the Best In Show at the art show, and rightfully so IMHO). Between the three of us, we also got a few other pieces including a modded Thomas Kinkade figurine in which Unspeakable Horrors are emerging from under the gardens of the charming saccharine cottage...
One green under-bust corset. Buying a corset at Dragon*Con is a little like getting laid at Dragon*Con, in that if you show up with the purpose of doing that thing, it's almost impossible not to complete the mission. I bought mine from the lovely people at Brute Force/Fallen Angel, whose work I have admired for a number of years. I had to special-order, though, surprisingly for fabric color, not for size. I could have bought a full corset with cups from them *off the rack*. Yes, I am impressed. The lovely gentleman who fitted me also gave me a t-shirt which reads "Rack-tastic" or some similar thing. I should get the corset in a few weeks, and will post pictures when I get it.
Shock-in-ator coffee from Coffee Shop of Horrors. Very tasty! (Their site might be down... great sadness across the land.)
Fabulous pictures, see last post.
A WoT tote bag that triadruid won in a trivia contest. Some speculation was made that it was of the size that would be needed to haul the last book around, if Robert Jordan did indeed wrap everything up into a single last volume...
Asha'man pins for my outfit. Without them, nobody recognized me, and then, when I said what I was, everybody was all shitty to me about it. "You can't be an Asha'man. Asha'man are all dudes." Well, yeah. It's a costume, not a lifestyle. Besides which, it's okay, because I'm queer. Aren't you glad you asked? (That might also belong in the bitching and moaning section.)

Thinking about next year

Next year, I'm doing a wind-up doll costume. I can see now that it will have to involve the green corset. I think I can make the key able to be carried, or inserted into the costume, *and turned*. I might even be able to rig it to play a music-box tune.
auraseer and I had a great geek-out moment in the van on the way home about the idea of doing a Girl Genius costume group for next year. He and I have claimed the purple and green Jagermonsters in Agatha's entourage. We are trying to convince triadruid to do the other Jagermonster and kittenpants to do Agatha. We'll see how that works.
I think I have enough theoretical knowledge to put together Sophie's Promethea armor now. So I might do that.
triadruid and I talked about doing a group of the Forsaken from Wheel of Time. I woke up this morning with some theories about doing Graendel's streith dress... He's going to do Sammael. Seeking other Forsaken to fill out the Thirteen.
triadruid requested to not march with the pirates next year in the parade. He has a point, there are so many of them already...
Pre-register for passes now!
Oh yes. triadruid and I will also need new Asha'man coats for next year. Oh noes, not more long black coats in the house.
Maybe think about staying an extra day at the end of Con, to avoid the check-out rush and give us some time to see things in Atlanta outside of the Con hotels.
I'm totally entering the Masquerade next year. I could not possibly be any worse than some of the costumes we saw, and I am certainly capable of being a good deal briefer in my performance.